Bryn Mawr Classical Review 95.05.05

Reviewed by Robert B. Todd, University of
British Columbia (bobtodd@unixg.ubc.ca).

On confronting
this translation, the eighth volume devoted to Alexander of Aphrodisias in
the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, the present reviewer cannot
help recalling the scholarly situation that prevailed when he began a
doctoral dissertation on this Aristotelian commentator in 1968. The last
monograph on Alexander had been a thèse by Paul Moraux published in
1941.
There were few current articles, and in fact more recent work on Alexander
and the other Greek Aristotelian commentators in publications by students
of medieval or renaissance philosophy and science than in those of
students of ancient philosophy. That situation is now totally changed,
thanks in no small measure to the prolific work on Alexander by the
present translator, R.W. Sharples of University College London, and to the
present series under its energetic editor, Professor Richard Sorabji of
King's College London. We shall also soon have the final "Alexandrian"
volume of Moraux's Der Aristotelismus bei den Griechen, completed
from his Nachlass by several hands, and can anticipate English
translations in the Ancient Commentators series of Alexander's most
important treatise, the de anima (of which there is also an Italian
version under way), and of its ancillary collection, the mantissa.
Budé editions of all his minor works are also in preparation.

But
it may still be some time before a graduate student will be told that
Alexander has been "done", as the avowedly ground-breaking nature of the
present volume reveals. This is the third part of Sharples' translation of
a heterogeneous collection of four books of texts known as the
Quaestiones, of which the modern edition is by Ivo Bruns in
Supplementum Aristotelicum 2.2 (Berlin 1892). It succeeds, in
admirably efficient biennial order, this scholar's versions of Book 4, the
Ethical Problems (1990), and of Quaestiones I.1-2.15 (1992).
The texts in this particular volume are notable for some interesting
discussions of Aristotle's de anima (qu. 2.24-27; 3.2-3, 6,
7, 9), and for an important defence (qu. 3.12) of the closed world
of Aristotelian cosmology against the Stoic and Epicurean alternatives, a
text that deserves to be better known as a contribution to an important
and popular theme in the history of science. (3.12 is, for example,
entirely neglected in E. Grant's magisterial survey of arguments about the
void, Much ado about Nothing [Cambridge, 1981].) Sharples is also
to be commended for including (at 89-94) translations of two texts in a
Florentine manuscript that clearly belong in the milieu of this
collection.

The Quaestiones were assembled in late
antiquity, and parts survive in Arabic, and thence in a few medieval Latin
versions. They are called skholikai, "school-discussion" (Sharples
2; or just "school" at 12); certainly their often elliptical and
abbreviated form suggests links with some procedure of formal instruction.
Perhaps they should even be termed "lecture-related", since skhole
can specifically mean a lecture in later Greek. The adjective
skholikos turned up 22 times in a search in the TLG disk (which I
thank Chris Morrissey for executing). Most relevant are occurrences in the
titles of commentaries by Ammonius and Philoponus (instances to be added
to that from Dionysius of Harlicanassus noted by LSJ) where
"lecture-related" is clearly the sense; e.g., Philoponus on the de
generatione et corruptione [Comm. in Aristot. Graec. 14:2] is
entitled skholikai aposemeioseis ("notes based on lectures"). In
anachronistic terms, many of these texts are essentially "handouts":
documents to be supplemented by further discussions that the modern
commentator must try and reconstruct. It is hard to imagine Alexander or
anyone trying to arrange for their wide diffusion.

In content this
whole collection is peculiar and problematic: items are arranged in no
obvious order; many are not "questions and solutions" at all; and the
majority can be linked with Aristotelian works on which Alexander is
either not known to have written commentaries, or for which his
commentaries no longer survive. These features raise problems, some of
which Sharples defines (2-3), but understandably cannot puruse in detail,
although in notes to this and the other volumes he has touched on a number
of important issues affecting the chronology and even authenticity of
individual texts.

Sharples (7) hopes that his translation will
"stimulate and facilitate" further research on these texts. It deserves to
achieve the former, and will surely accomplish the latter. The
translations are careful and painstaking, and the notes invariably helpful
and suggestive. (For what I gather are economic reasons the footnotes in
this series are now unfortunately relegated to the end of the volume
[110-145], along with the Textual Emendations [100-109].) There is as
usual an English-Greek Glossary (161-174) and Greek-English Index
(175-204), as well as an index locorum and subject index (205-212).
Sorabji's useful survey of the commentators is reprinted (151-160), but
without any cross-reference at 153n4 to the annotated translation of
qu. 3.12 in the present volume. The text is usefully revised; Ivo
Bruns, like many participants in the Berlin Academy edition of the
commentators, was not always the most careful and thoughtful editor.
Sharples must be warmly congratulated on completing this project. The
remainder of this review will deal with some sundry details, and briefly
suggest ways in which some of these texts might be further explored.

Sharples (5-6) warns us that he is not going to be rigidly consistent
in the translation of terminology at the expense of readability, but will
usually aim to be consistent within single quaestiones. This principle
seems to have been effectively applied, and so my queries involve
relatively minor points. For example, the particle ê used to
introduce solutions to problems is always rendered "or rather", but where
it introduces more than one possible solution (as in qu. 2.25)
"perhaps" (favoured by other recent translators) might be more
appropriate. But in qu. 2.19 (at 63.16) ê introduces a
single solution, and so something like "now then" might best introduce the
dogmatic response. Also, why if aporia is "puzzle" in the title (p.
11; 44.1) does it become "difficulty" elsewhere? Certainly "raise/resolve
a difficulty" (qu. 3.3, 82.34-36) arguably introduces needless
variety when the specific "difficulty" is identified by a question.

I swear off comment on qu. 3.12 since I am cited in connection
with it. I would, however, note that my emendation en hautoi for
en hautois at 101.25 is referred to at n. 320, but not included in
the list of textual emendations at p. 105.

Qu. 3.13 is a
text of particular interest because it is part of Alexander's discussion
of phantasia, an account that is rightly beginning to attract the
kind of attention hitherto confined to discussions of this subject by the
neoplatonist commentators. Here I would just suggest that 3.13, and other
Alexandrian material, needs to be more carefully discussed in its
Aristotelian context. Most of Sharples' notes (nn. 359-366) gather
Alexandrian parallels, while D. Modrak's recent article ("Alexander on
phantasia," in Ancient Minds [= Southern Journal of
Philosophy 31 (Supplement), 1993] 173-97) fails to identify
effectively the exegetical context of Alexander's account. Before this
commentator is treated like an original thinker, his ever-present
exegetical goals (cf. his de anima 2.4-6 Bruns) -- no less
important for often being latent -- should be acknowledged. For example,
the reader should know that the "strict" definition of phantasia at
3.13, 108.3-4 reproduces Aristotle, de anima 429a1-2 (cf.
428b13-14), a fact as important as the Alexandrian references gathered at
Sharples n. 364.

For qu. 3.15 the title could arguably be
translated "About 'what is as it were without parts'", making its subject
the expression hoionei ameres. The formula "as it were without
parts" is probably a hypothetical, rather than an actual, attempt (see
Sharples n. 391) to escape the difficulty that atoms that are defined as
partless bodies are not bodies at all. Sharples initially translates just
hoionei in italics or in inverted commas, but ceases to do so as
the quaestio proceeds. There is a case for representing Alexander
throughout as mentioning rather than using this whole phrase, since it may
be an echo of Aristotle de anima 3.6, 430b11-13 where a line
thought of as divided into two parts is said to have halves that are
hoionei meke ("as it were lengths"; "new wholes of length" [Smith;
Oxford translation]). A commentator as imaginative as Alexander may have
digressed on what sense could be made of the expression "as it were
without parts", given that this would be the status of a length thought in
undivided time. that is "as it were" a magnitude could also be without
parts, an issue that can, as Sharples rightly notes, be linked to
discussions of atomism. Indeed, this quaestio may have originated in a
discussion of the critique of atomism at de generatione et
corruptione 1.2, an Aristotelian treatise represented elsewhere in
this collection (cf. qu. 2.22, 3.4, and 3.5).

Finally, in
the bibliography the reprints of at least the articles by Ackrill and
Pines might have been noted: thus Ackrill's celebrated paper "Aristotle's
definitions of psuckhe," is also in J. Barnes et al. (eds.),
Articles on Aristotle: 4, London 1979; and Pines' paper on a
fragment of Xenocrates is in his Studies in Arabic Versions of Greek
Texts and in Medieval Science, Jerusalem and Leiden 1986. Also, if
"Donini (1982)" (= P.L. Donini, Le scuole, l'anima, l'impero: la
filosophia antica da Antioco a Plotino, Turin 1982) is recommended
(146) for its general survey of Alexander, it should be included in this
bibliography, as it is in earlier volumes of Sharples' translations.